Though closely related to it linguistically, Zok is completely unintelligible to speakers of Standard Eastern Armenian, and is therefore properly considered a separate language. Speakers of the language refer to it as zokerēn “Zok language”. Because Zok is so different from other varieties of Armenian, many myths about its nature and origins have arisen in the Armenian community. The most commonly held opinion is that the Zoks are half-Armenian, half-Jewish merchants who intentionally formed a secret language so that outsiders would be unable to understand their business dealings. According to another opinion, expressed to me by a prominent Armenologist who will remain unnamed, the Zoks are the descendants of Irish settlers from India! The reality is that the Zoks are simply one of the indigenous Armenian communities of Nakhichevan, and have probably lived there since the Classical Armenian period. Their language is closely related to the nearby dialects of Karabagh and Julfa, and its unintelligibility to other Armenians is due primarily to a major realignment that occurred in its vowel system at an unknown point in the past.
The innovations just described conspire to make Zok one of the most divergent varieties of Armenian. Nevertheless, in certain other respects it is one of the most archaic dialects. Some notable archaisms include the preservation of the proto-Armenian consonant series (group 6); the survival of the reflex of proto-Armenian l in kakhts‘ ‘milk’ < IE *glkt- (cf. Greek galaktos; all other forms of Armenian show variants of kat‘, with no trace of the original *l)
